Gun laws are useless? That's all wet

February 03, 2013|Eric Zorn | Change of Subject

Two tables side by side, were filled with recently recovered firearms displayed at the Calumet District police station in Chicago, Monday, Jan. 28, 2013, to coincide with a press conference to announce the large number of gun seizures throughout Chicago. (Antonio Perez)

I'm with you on the futility of municipal gun bans and other localized restrictions on the private ownership of firearms. They present obstacles mainly for responsible, law-abiding people and do little to prevent evildoers from obtaining and carrying lethal weapons.

But please. In the wake of the recent uptick in firearms fatalities in Chicago I've heard a corresponding uptick in your triumphant claim that the carnage here — a city with some of the toughest gun-control laws in the nation — illustrates not just that gun control doesn't work, but also that it has the perverse effect of making our streets more dangerous.

Truth is, attempts to declare "no gun" zones in urban areas that are surrounded by suburban and exurban dealers are doomed to be as ineffective as declaring "no peeing" zones in public swimming pools. In both cases, the flow is so easy and inevitable that it renders boundaries basically imaginary.

As long as we permit the straw purchase of virtually unlimited numbers of firearms, as long as we don't carefully track the custody of these weapons from hand to hand and as long as we don't require background checks prior to every gun sale, local ordinances will be chain-link levees. Their "failure" proves nothing, suggests nothing.

Police don't yet have a suspect in custody in the shooting death of 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton in a South Side park Tuesday afternoon. But what do you want to bet that the murder weapon, if it's ever recovered, will have been bought by someone else, then sold, passed around or stolen until it ended up in the hands of the thug who fired the bullet that struck Hadiya in the back?

Strict, Chicago-style gun restrictions might reduce violence if implemented nationwide — it works in other countries — but we all know that's a political nonstarter, and no one is seriously suggesting it. In fact, the legal trend is going the other way, with Illinois poised to become the final state to allow licensed residents to carry concealed weapons. This development will at least start to level the battlefield in the war between those who follow the law and those who don't.

So meet us halfway here. Universal background checks. Heavy penalties and other safeguards against straw purchases. And no gloating about Chicago's homicide rate.

Dear Boy Scouts of America:

All signs suggest that your national board will lift the long-standing prohibition against homosexual Scouts and Scout leaders by voting at a meeting this week to allow locally chartered groups to set their own participation policies.

But don't proudly pin on that nondiscrimination merit badge just yet.

Lifting the blanket ban while still allowing the ban to remain in place in certain localities is a wimpy nod to tolerance and inclusion. Think of how it would sound in other contexts:

"We're not a racist organization. We simply allow our department heads to practice racism at their discretion."

Go all out. Tell your local chapters, "No group operating under the proud banner of the Boy Scouts of America is allowed to exercise the hoary bigotries that this nation is putting behind it, and, like the Girl Scouts of America have done for more than a dozen years, must not discriminate against anyone on the basis of race, ethnicity, religious belief, disability or sexual identity. Period. Be prepared ... to enter the 21st century."

Did that mention of "religious belief" slip past you?

Didn't think so. You've long banned atheists from your ranks on the grounds that the Scout Oath requires the performance of a "duty to God" and being "morally straight," and the Scout Law demands that a Scout be "reverent."

It's a very loose requirement, allowing for all manner of acknowledgment of a spiritual higher power: "We understand that (Scouts will) translate that word in their own minds to whatever understanding they have of God," an organization spokesman once told me in an interview. "That understanding is between a Scout and his parents" and can include a supreme being or any number of higher powers, he said.

My compromise suggestion — that nonbelievers who want to be Scouts pledge to do their "duty to God" while silently thinking that the extent of that duty is respecting and accepting the ideas of God cherished by others — never won the favor of atheists. They argue, reasonably, that no one should have to play word games and keep his faith-based views to himself to join an organization this isn't basically religious. And that the implication that nonbelievers aren't "morally straight" is offensive and unfair.

The courts have ruled that, as a private group, you're entitled to set your membership standards.

But as spokesman David Silverman of American Atheists said Friday, "Legally, the Scouts can practice bigotry. But morally, they shouldn't."